• Jason House <jason.james.house gmail.com> Sep 24 2010

Jason House <jason.james.house gmail.com> writes:

Don Wrote:

 Don wrote:
 The docs currently state that:


 PROPOSAL:
 Drop the first requirement. Only one requirement is necessary:
 
 A pure function does not read or write any global mutable state.
 


 Wow. It seems that not one person who has responded so far has 
 understood this proposal! I'll try again. Under this proposal:
 
 If you see a function which has mutable parameters, but is marked as 
 'pure', you can only conclude that it doesn't use global variables. 
 That's not much use on it's own. Let's call this a 'weakly-pure' function.
 
 However, if you see a function maked as 'pure', which also has only 
 immutable parameters, you have the same guarantee which 'pure' gives us 
 as the moment. Let's call this a 'strongly-pure' function.
 
 The benefit of the relaxed rule is that a strongly-pure function can 
 call a weakly-pure functions, while remaining strongly-pure.
 This allows very many more functions to become strongly pure.
 
 The point of the proposal is *not* to provide the weak guarantee. It is 
 to provide the strong guarantee in more situations.


It looks like your proposal was accepted. Walter just checked in changes to
make this a reality.  http://www.dsource.org/projects/dmd/changeset/687